Jason Strong is serving a 46-year prison sentence. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune / August 18, 2010)
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By Dan Hinkel, Chicago Tribune reporter
8:34 p.m. CST, February 26, 2013

After being shot down by higher courts, defense lawyers trying to prove that Jason Strong is not a murderer are seeking help from an agency known for its skepticism toward claims of innocence — the Lake County prosecutor's office.
Strong's lawyers hope the new state's attorney, who has vowed to reform an office plagued by prosecutions that fell apart, will present the case to the panel he has created to investigate potential injustices. The outside lawyers on the committee were sworn in as special assistant state's attorneys Thursday.
State's Attorney Mike Nerheim said Strong's case is one of five he's considering putting before the panel.
From the beginning, Strong's case was unusual in that he confessed, then stood trial about five years before authorities identified the slaying victim as Mary Kate Sunderlin, a mentally disabled Kane County woman.
Based in part on what has emerged about Sunderlin, who was 34 when she was killed in 1999, Strong's lawyers argue the case has crumbled. A trial witness has said he falsely implicated Strong under pressure from police, and defense lawyers argue there are other suspects, including Sunderlin's husband. He has an arrest record and a history of mental illness and confessed to killing her, according to court records.
On Jan. 30, the Illinois Supreme Court rejected Strong's latest bid to reconsider his case. That exhausts his appeals in state court, leaving his lawyers to try to persuade a federal judge to order a new trial or other remedy, said one of his attorneys, Thomas Geraghty, director of Northwestern University's Bluhm Legal Clinic.
Strong, 37, who is serving a 46-year prison sentence, is also vying for attention from the panel set up by Nerheim to audit convictions won by his predecessor, Michael Waller. The panel, Nerheim said, is designed to restore trust in an agency that has routinely disregarded forensic evidence suggesting innocence.
Four cases collapsed under the weight of DNA during Waller's last years in office — after the men spent a combined 60 years in prison.
Waller could not be reached for comment.
The new prosecutor said he doesn't plan to oppose inmates' efforts to find evidence indicating their innocence. Nerheim said he made no objection to a convict's recent request for DNA tests. In one of the cases that collapsed, prosecutors for years resisted tests sought by a man convicted of murder, arguing DNA wouldn't clear him. A higher court ordered tests, and authorities soon said forensic evidence had led them to another man, who is now charged with murder. The original convict was cleared after 15 years in prison.
"I can't think of a good reason to object to DNA," Nerheim said.
Geraghty acknowledged he doesn't have a "smoking gun" indicating someone else's guilt in the Sunderlin killing but said circumstantial evidence points to other suspects.
In December 1999, an unidentified woman's body was found in a North Chicago forest preserve. Days later, investigators questioned Strong, who lived in a motel along U.S. Highway 41 northwest of Waukegan. He confessed to beating her to death, but later said he gave a false confession because detectives broke him emotionally.
Investigators wrote that Strong told them he had met her outside, invited her in, and then, after finding her rifling through his possessions, he beat her, hit her in the face with a tequila bottle and burned her with cigarettes and hot wax. He said another man helped him load her into a van, and a third man joined them for the ride to the forest preserve, according to a police report. Police said he showed them where the body was found. Strong later said the officers led the way.
His two alleged accomplices implicated Strong, according to court records, but one recanted, did not testify and then died, according to Tribune archives. The other man has given varying accounts.
That man wrote in an affidavit that officers fed him details of the crime and pressured him to say Strong killed her. He testified against Strong at trial — though a prosecutor told jurors the witness was "truthfully challenged" — and pleaded guilty to obstruction. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
The revelation of the victim's identity released a flood of information, and Strong's lawyers argue that authorities should take a closer look at a mother-daughter pair who associated with Sunderlin before her death, one of whom tried to get a replacement ATM card in Sunderlin's name after her death, according to court and police records.
It has never been clear how or why Sunderlin — who did not drive — would have gone to Lake County, Geraghty said.
And after Sunderlin was reported missing, a one-armed man she had married was arrested on a separate matter at a Florida mental health facility, and he told police she was buried in a yard in Elgin, according to court records and police. Police dug up the yard but found nothing.
The husband told conflicting stories, according to court records, telling police he killed her, that another man killed her, that he killed her in Cuba and that he killed her in Kentucky. He was never charged with her murder.
As they fought Strong's appeals, prosecutors wrote that the husband had "tenuous ties with reality," and the defense has no convincing evidence that he or the mother-daughter pair are plausible suspects. The daughter told a Tribune reporter in 2010 that the mother had died.
dhinkel@tribune.com